The world ripe for LTE. The last quarter of last year was particularly difficult for the telecommunications operators and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment. Deutsche Telekom loss of 730 million EUR and the decline in real income of the largest global operator, Vodafone, by about 1%, pose major problems in this market. The cause of both problems is the crisis and saturation of the market. The biggest problems occur in Europe. The examples are a relatively large drop in revenues in Spain (Vodafone recorded 5.8% decline) and Greece (the Deutsche Telekom loss was mainly caused by this market).
Even more difficult is the situation among the manufacturers of the equipment. In mid-January Nortel has filed for protection from creditors, in the last quarter Motorola suffered a loss of 3.6 billion dollars and a decrease in turnover from 9.65 billion USD in 2007 to 7.1 billion USD in 2008. Sony Ericsson, after a profit of 1.4 billion USD in 2007, recorded nearly 100 million USD loss in 2008.
Governments of the United States and European countries want to avoid at any cost bankruptcies of large producers and increase in unemployment levels. They develop programs that should counteract the tendencies. The first one will be American investment in the revitalization of the U.S. telecom market. The Barack Obama's stimulus package includes 6 billion dollars investment in the development of wireless and broadband Internet access and additional 11 billion dollars for the development of intelligent networks.
So far, in Europe there are no such actions in the field of telecommunications, however everyone is convinced that the UE, introducing new broadcasting technologies, at least will not repeat the mistakes of the high concession fees which drained the money earmarked for investments in GSM and UMTS networks.
An opportunity for Europeans and Americans is LTE technology. This is a technology in which European and U.S. firms have many advantages over Asian competitors, so starting the solutions on their own markets they may contribute to the overall success and improve the performance of both operators and manufacturers. Currently, the most powerful position in LTE have Sony Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Alcatel, Motorola.
LTE is already gaining momentum. At the beginning of February, Motorola has launched in Swindon, UK, the first test telecommunications network working in LTE (4G) technology. The network operates in the 2.6 GHz band. It simultaneously allows to make voice calls and perform data transmission in 4G technology. The estimated speed of data transmission is between 29 and 226 Mbps. In the U.S. market, commercial launch of LTE is announced by Verizon, for later this year.
LTE (Long Term Evolution) is being developed as a 4G standard, to improve the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). LTE is to increase the performance of the 3G UMTS packet service (based on TCP/IP protocol), with data rates over 100 Mbps. LTE wireless interface is based on OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) in the downlink and SC-FDMA (Single-Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access) in the uplink. There are used QPSK, 16QAM, and 4QAM modulations. The standard efficiently supports multi-antenna technologies (MIMO).